A tweet from Pope Francis the other day asked: “Are our lives truly filled with the presence of God? How many things take the place of God in my life each day?”
Some time, about two hundred years ago a good and wise Englishman, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote these words which to me suggest that he was not too far from the truth himself:
“Another and more fruitful, perhaps more solid, inference from the facts (he was referring to our material existence and the world around us) would be, that there is something in the human mind which makes it know that in all finite quantity, there is an infinite, in all measures of time an eternal; that the latter are the basis, the substance, of the former; and that, as we truly are only as far as God is with us, so neither can we truly possess, that is, enjoy our being or any other real good, but by living in the sense of His holy presence.” This may be open to a somewhat pantheistic interpretation but if Blessed John Henry Newman was happy to quote it then I am happy to be moved by it.
Author: Michael Kirke
Michael Kirke was born in Co. Donegal and attended St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, 1957-1962. In 1966 he graduated from University College Dublin (History and Politics). In 1966 he began working on the editorial desk of The Evening Press in Dublin and in 1968 went to the newsroom of the Irish Press group of newspapers – contributing news and features to the group’s three titles, The Irish Press (morning paper), The Evening Press and The Sunday Press. In 1969 he went to Belfast and covered the initial unravelling of the Unionist hegemony in the province. Later that year he became the group’s education specialist. In 1973 took leave of absence to pursue postgraduate studies in education in Trinity College Dublin where he graduated in 1976. In 1978 he left journalism and moved into teaching. In 1981 was appointed headmaster of Rockbrook Park School in Dublin (www.rockbrook.ie). In 1994 resigned from that post and moved to live in the West of Ireland (Galway) where he began working part-time in media again. He is now back in Dublin working, among other things, as a freelance writer. His main interests are in political, cultural and educational affairs – as well as issues related to religious faith.
Spelling it out just like it is?
Gerald Warner’s very comprehensive review of our current and ongoing “real and present danger”.
The scale of this genocide challenges the imagination. Worldwide, abortion is now the leading cause of death, killing as many people as all other causes combined; one in five pregnancies ends in abortion. In the United States 55 million Americans have been aborted; in Britain the total is 7.9 million – the legacy of David Steel, a politician who undoubtedly “made a difference”. UK abortions are currently running at about 200,000 a year, of which 12,000 are Scots. Yet it is still not enough for Planned Parenthood, the Obama White House and all the other acolytes of the culture of death. Later this month a huge pro-abortion conference titled ‘Women Deliver’ will be held in Kuala Lumpur with the objective of promoting abortion around the world, especially in Christian and Muslim countries where infanticide still encounters resistance.
Read his full Scotsman column here.
Parting of the ways at the abortion crossroads
In an interview with The Sunday Times, published yesterday, the next Catholic primate of Ireland has said politicians who “knowingly introduce legislation aiding and abetting abortion” should not “approach [a priest] looking for communion”.
In the clearest statement so far on the church’s position Archbishop Eamon Martin, who will succeed Cardinal Seán Brady next year, said legislators who support abortion are excommunicating themselves.
“You cannot regard yourself as a person of faith and support abortion,” Martin said in the interview. “You cannot believe you are with your church and directly help someone to procure an abortion. This includes medical professionals and the legislators.
“If a legislator comes to me and says, ‘Can I be a faithful Catholic and support abortion?’ I would say no. Your communion is ruptured if you support abortion. You are excommunicating yourself. Any legislator who clearly and publicly states this should not approach looking for communion.”
‘Sure what would you want more than a tractor?
The Week reports this good news in its current issue: Farmers are always being told to diversify. Some convert barns for holiday lettings, others set up farm tours. James Oswald, a livestock farmer in Scotland, chose to put pen to paper – and after years of often fruitless self-publication, he has seen his latest book rocket to the top of the charts. Natural Causes, a thriller set in Edinburgh, has been downloaded 350,000 times from Amazon’s Kindle store. Its success has earned Oswald a three-book deal with Penguin, and a £150,000 advance. He has already spent the first instalment on a tractor.
Conscience and political decisions – an Irish angle
An Iona Institute lunchtime conference on “Conscience and the Irish abortion bill”, Thursday, June 6. Time: 12.30pm-2pm. Where: Buswells hotel, Dublin.
This conference will examine the issue of abortion and conscience in the light of the Irish Government’s proposed abortion law.
While the single biggest objection to the proposed law is that it will allow for the direct and intentional destruction of unborn human life, another issue that has not received enough attention is the way in which the planned law will seriously infringe the conscience rights of pro-life doctors, nurses and hospitals.
The speakers will be Dr Donal O’Mathuna and Dr John Murray.
Dr O’Mathuna will examine the implications of the proposed law for the conscience rights of pro-life doctors, nurses and hospitals.
Dr Murray will address the conscience issues facing pro-life politicians as they face into a vote on the matter.
Dr Murray is lecturer in moral theology at Mater Dei Institute and Dr O’Mathuna is Senior Lecturer in Ethics at Dublin City University.
Each speaker will talk for about 20 minutes so as to allow plenty of time for questions.
The Iona Institute’s submission to the Irish parliament’s Health Committee on the conscience implications of the proposed law can be found here on http://www.ionainstitute.ie.
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“And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes”
This morning we heard the sad news of the passing of young Donal Walsh of Tralee. Donal’s moving story – mostly in his own words – appeared here some several weeks ago after he made the country stop and listen to his pleas to his own generation to wake up and fight against the plague of suicide.
Donal, who would have celebrated his seventeenth birthday in just a month’s time died on the evening of the Feast of the Ascension. May he rest in peace. His bravery, his courage and his practical idealism was an inspiration to his own and every other generation. In what he did and wrote and spoke about he has left a legacy of remarkable value for a boy of just sixteen years of age. One follower of Garvan Hill described the post with Donal’s story as the best he had ever read among the 200 or so posts on the blog.
The words of John Milton in Lycidas, his elegy for his friend Edward King, seem appropriate for the occasion of Donal’s last climb up the monntains in his journey on this earth.
Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor;
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high
Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves;
Where, other groves and other streams along,
With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet societies,
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
A Machiavellian “product of political expediency”
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew
That one… pig-headed Government, apparently deaf and blind to all reasonable argument – but unfortunately not dumb – could carry on with this treacherous and lethal folly. William Binchy, one of the finest legal minds in Ireland and former Regius Professor of Laws at Trinity College Dublin, in an op-ed in this morning’s edition of the Irish Times lays bare the folly of the Irish Government’s drive for abortion legislation.
He calls for “plain speaking”, something that is in very short supply in the Irish media generally and from the mouths of most of Ireland’s public representatives in particular where forked tongues are heavily oversupplied.
As Professor Binchy outlines it for us, the Government is proposing, for the first time since Ireland became independent from Britain nearly 100 years ago, that a law be passed prescribing the death of innocent human beings.
The forked tongues insist on calling these human being foetuses, an “it” rather than a “thou” or “I”. When “your” and “I”, dear reader, were conceived we were not an “it”. We were “I” and “”thou”, the same as today and forever. Our levels of consciousness did not make us an “it”. Making us an “it”, then or now would, not have made our destruction – had we been treated in the way the Irish Government is now proposing to treat thousands of our fellow human beings – any less heinous.
In what it is proposing, Professor Binchy points out, the Irish Government is flying in the face of the evidence of psychiatrists presented to it last January, as well as the overwhelming evidence of international research. He continues:
It falsely claims that it is bound to take this step by the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, whereas in fact the judgment merely requires clarity in our law. The Bill provides no extra clarity as to medical treatment. Instead, it sets up a procedure for decision-making and decision-makers, with no guidance beyond current medical practice as to the content of any decision to be made.
The Taoiseach claims that the Bill doesn’t change the position but he is here engaging in a tricky use of language. The Bill changes the position in practice in a profound way. It requires hospitals that respect the equality and dignity of everyone to introduce facilities for the termination by obstetricians of the lives of babies of physically healthy mothers where suicidal ideation is established in accordance with the criteria for abortion set out in the Supreme Court decision of over 20 years ago.
The Bill defines “unborn as it relates to human life” as meaning “following implantation until such time as it has completely proceeded in a living state from the body of the woman”.
He concludes with his call for plain speaking and gives us some of his own.
Everybody knows that the Bill is the product of political expediency (and, for the Labour Party, an important and necessary step on a sure road to wide-ranging abortion).
Those who are lawyers know that it is not legally required. Those who are doctors know that it is not medically necessary. And those who are psychiatrists know that it is actually damaging to the welfare of some of their patients.
Let us strive over the coming weeks to encourage our legislators to step back from the brink and instead ensure that there is clear legal support and extra clarity for current medical practice that recognises the humanity of mothers and their unborn children.
This proposed legislation is threatening to divide Ireland into two opposing camps harbouring animosity and bitterness towards each other on a scale not seen since the bitter civil war which divided the country after independence and persisted through many decades. No Irish Taoiseach has been regarded with the animosity and loathing with which Taoiseach Enda Kenny is now regarded by a very sizable percentage of the Irish electorate since the two decades following that civil war. His party came to power after the last general election on the basis of support from Ireland’s pro-life majority and on the understanding that he would protect the life of the unborn. He is now reviled for breaking that promise and that revulsion will be the dominant taste of his legacy in Irish history – regardless of all the commendable work the public servants of his government are now doing to pull Ireland out of the economic mess for which all its politicians of the last decade bear responsibility.
Irish publicly funded radio “groupthink” exposed – yet again. Then it “clarifies”.
The Iona Insitute, favourite whipping boy of Ireland’s left, was the butt of a piece of shameless pro-abortion special pleading on Irish national radio this morning. You can read the full account of this in a clear and damning statement issued by the institute later in the day.
The statement explains how, in the course of the station’s flagship morning news programme -with the station’s highest listenership – the programme’s anchor, Cathal MacCoille, interviewed a New Zealand academic, Dr David Fergusson, about a paper he has written regarding the mental health effects of abortion.
In the course of that interview, and a subsequent interview with Irish psychiatrist, Professor Patricia Casey, MacCoille badly misinterpreted the Iona Institute’s take on the Fergusson paper and led listeners to believe Dr Fergusson was unhappy with how we quoted his research.
“This is absolutely false as a reading of the interview with Fergusson shows. Twice MacCoille put quotes from our website to Fergusson and twice Fergusson said he had no issue with how we presented his research”, the Iona statement said.
The exchanges between the two men, in full transcript, make for bewildering reading. This is certainly one for the broadcasting watchdog to take in hand. What this latest example of media bias in favour of the Irish government’s abortion steamroller shows is how tough a battle the pro-life forces have on their hands with the strength of their arguments being bludgeoned wholesale by numerous instances of this kind of irrationality posing as honest and fair journalism.
Two days later RTE “manned up” and Cathal MacCoille claified – but did not utter the word he should have uttered, “sorry”.
The clarification, read out by Cathal MacCoille, said:
‘On Tuesday, May 7th, we broadcast interviews with Professor David Fergusson of the University of Otago at Christchurch, New Zealand and with Professor Patricia Casey, Consultant Psychiatrist at UCD and the Mater. The subject was the reported unhappiness by Professor Fergusson at the way his research was being interpreted by pro-life parties to the abortion debate here. In the course of the interview with Professor Casey, I said that Professor Fergusson had said he was unhappy at the way the Iona Institute had been citing his research. In fact, Professor Fergusson did not say he was unhappy with how the Iona Institute quoted his research and we’re happy to clarify that.’
The Iona Institute said: We are happy that this clarification has been issued but of course the need to issue it should never have arisen in the first place.
Language alert – now at DEFCON 1
In the midst of the present debate it is very worthwhile taking a look at this letter which appeared in the Irish Independent on 24 January this year. This process of language distortion in the service of ethical and social and programming is in top gear in Ireland just now.
Language is all important in the current debate about abortion. Subtle changes in the use of terms can gradually help to bring about and even justify ways of looking at ethical issues that previously were not acceptable.
A famous example of this comes from an editorial in the September issue of ‘California Medicine’, 1970, which referred to changing attitudes to abortion in western society. It refers, in the following excerpt, to the need for a linguistic strategy if abortion was to gain acceptance.
“Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced, it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent.
“The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous, whether intra- or extra-uterine, until death.
“The very considerable semantic gymnastics that are required to rationalise abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices.”
It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.
This is a stark reminder to all of us not to allow slippage in our use of language, which could entail radically transforming our society and the state to facilitate the taking of life in an unjustifiable manner.
We can see how far the US has moved down that road of destruction since that editorial of 1970.
We are on the edge of that precipice just now.
Seamus Grimes
Tirellan Heights, Galway
Dreadful contradictions of the proposed Irish abortion law
This is from a very clear article in today’s Irish Independent. What hope is there that any of those we have empowered to make decisions about our lives and deaths will open their ears to reason, even just to listen and try to answer instead of spouting out meaningless spin?
Our Constitution upholds the right to life of the unborn as well as the born. This helps keep notions of death as a treatment for any condition out of our healthcare services. The other heads of this bill go to great lengths to reaffirm our commitment to the lives of pregnant women and the unborn. The approach taken to suicide during pregnancy contradicts these commitments and questions the legitimacy of the proposed approach.
International medical evidence shows that abortion is not a safe treatment for suicide. Those parts of the bill should be removed, and a commitment given to provide the most effective, evidence-based treatments for pregnant women with suicidal ideation. That would better serve the health and rights of pregnant women and their unborn children.
Read the full article by Dr. Donal O Mathuna here.
Garvan Hill 